We Are Young
by stepinsideme
Summary: One shot with possibility to become a fic. AU Marauders ditch Hogwarts after the muggleborns come under serious threat. Even Lily is giving up hope, until someone changes her mind.


**AU Marauders one shot, with possibilities to turn into a fic. Not sure if I will or not. Characters are not mine, I just like to mess with them.**

* * *

><p>Lily dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out with the toe of her old Doc Martens. Her mouth tasted bitter now, but she felt better. When asked, she'd never be able to tell someone when or why she started smoking. The memory was repressed, deep down in her thoughts.<p>

She thrust her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans and left the alley she'd ducked into to smoke without the wind interfering. Now the wind tugged at her long auburn hair, throwing it in vicious whips around her face and shoulders. Lily didn't care. She'd not brushed it since she'd left the hostel the night before last. The sleep she'd gotten hadn't exactly been comfortable. Her freckles were showing now, the foundation from days before worn off, though her eyes still remained ringed by eyeliner she'd reapplied in a car mirror earlier that day.

The streets were deserted now. People didn't stay out late on this side of town unless they were people like her; people with no reason to be anywhere else. At seventeen, she should probably legally have been in her home under her parents control, but it had been many years since she'd been obedient to them. Besides, she didn't fancy pretending to listen to them anymore.

The summer sun was still slightly visible on the horizon, colouring the sky in a way that Lily would once have thought of as beautiful. Now, her older and more sceptical mind only saw a blur of colours that may as well have been grey and brown for all the enjoyment they brought her.

Lily had lost faith in beauty. She'd lost faith in a lot of things.

Pushing her hair from her face, the redhead turned onto the high street where people were busy falling in and out of pubs. They weren't paying attention to yet another of the scabby teenagers who just happened to have stumbled in their path. They saw the tattoos on Lily's bare arms, the holes in her jeans and the roll up behind her ear and disregarded her from their notice. Then again people disregarded her no matter which world she was in now. Here, it was more superficial. These people cared about what was on her skin, not inside of it.

As she passed pubs and closed shop windows, she could hear the strumming of an acoustic guitar. It was the familiar sound of a busker. She turned right, up towards the library; she could see the source of the music now. It wasn't hard to recognise the messy heads of her fellow disillusioned youths. Sirius Black with the guitar, James Potter rolling a cigarette, Mary Macdonald and Marlene McKinnon singing quietly, Remus Lupin smoking. It was a scene Lily almost expected now.

"She returns from her wanderings." Sirius spoke up, his voice edging on sarcastic as he regarded Lily. The others all looked in her direction and she merely offered them a shrug before sinking down to sit next to James, offering him the roll up from behind her ear.

"Did you find anything?" Mary asked, unable to hide the hope in her voice.

Lily shook her head. "People are being more careful. They must know scavengers are around. No one is leaving out papers, no traces of magic at all really." The hope faded from Mary's eyes at Lily's words. She was the only one who ever expressed the thoughts they were all thinking.

With the new Ministry of Magic purifying the wizarding race, there hadn't been many options left open to the group of teenagers. Their initial rebellions had been met with torture. They'd seen friends murdered. Eventually, Mary, Lily, Marlene and Remus had handed in their wands and run, going into hiding as muggles. James and Sirius had quickly followed suit, knowing their new status as blood traitors would see them all killed too.

Now, the remaining wizarding world was keeping itself hidden from those it had rejected. Enchantments had been put in place, keeping them from contacting those who were still 'acceptable'. Without their wands most of their magic was useless. It had been lucky that the group of them had been able to find each other. Lily imagined many rejects would be living alone, trying to cope.

Anyone who'd known Lily before would probably have found it hard to understand why she'd surrendered. Surely her magic had been worth fighting for? Yes. It had been. The thing was, Lily's self of sense preservation had won out. She couldn't die. She was seventeen. Her fate now turned out to be crueller than death, she'd found. Living and being denied the world that she knew was hers was a subtle kind of torture that infiltrated her being every moment of every day. She'd given up her family to protect them from the wrath of the New Ministry. All she had left were the five people in front of her, whose minds she could feel slipping further and further away from her every day.

James exhaled smoke; the smell hit Lily's senses and jolted her from her thoughts. The group seemed to have fallen similarly silent during her inner musings.

"We need to do something. I'm fed up of sitting around and waiting for the world to bloody change." James spoke suddenly, stubbing out the cigarette angrily. Really, the idea should have inspired some sort of reaction from the group but now, they'd heard him say this almost every day for the past month.

Lily sighed, dropping her head into her hands. "There's nothing we can do, James. We've got no magic, no contacts, no means of making contacts and barely any money left."

"Maybe we should just live like Muggles…" Mary suggested, her voice empty of the hope it had previously held.

"No!" Sirius protested. "We're not muggles! We're wizards damn it."

It was the same argument every single time. "What good are we without wands? Or potions ingredients or anything that could actually have any magical impact?" Marlene spoke up, her voice biting and revealing her own frustration.

"We shouldn't give up, but we shouldn't act rashly either." Remus, the ever present voice of logic, reasoned.

James growled in frustration, flicking his lighter on and off with his fingers. Without his wand to play with, it was his new vice. "We're Gryffindors! We were the smartest people at Hogwarts and we can't think of something to do?"

"This isn't school, James. This is the real world and we're just a bunch of kids." Lily's voice was hollow, her head in her hands and staring between her knees to the ground.

"Bugger it Lily don't talk like that!" James was suddenly on his feet. "We've moped about this for too long! We need to actually do something before we all lose our bloody minds."

Sirius was the only one who reacted with any noticeable enthusiasm. Perhaps he recognised the spark that had reignited in James' eyes. "What're you thinking Prongs?"

The use of nicknames made Remus raise his head as well. Lily was listening too, though she refused to act like it. She couldn't stand getting her hopes up if this was a foolish idea.

"We need to find others like us. Other people who're in hiding. Without wands. We can make contacts with other wizards, they just need to be rejects like us."

Lily groaned. "Yes, James, we know that. Thing is, we don't have any way of finding people."

"Are you telling me you've never just… Known someone was magic?"

Mary spoke up now. "What do we do once we've found other people?"

James was starting to get excited by his own idea now. "We create an army with the best of both worlds. I bet most wizards can't make a shield charm quickly enough to block a bullet. C'mon they've never had reason to! Plus, someone has to have some sort of knowledge of things we can use for magic. There must be people with wand knowledge, or who can gather potion ingredients or something."

Lily ignored the bubble of hope growing in her chest. "It won't work, James."

He turned around to face her, tugging her shoulders until she stood up in front of him. The rest of the group had the good grace to look the other way. "Why not, Lily?" His voice was suddenly low and intense, his eyes boring into hers. She couldn't ignore the other feeling in her chest as easily as she could ignore the hope.

Her voice was low as well when she answered. "I can't lose magic twice." She confessed as James' hands came up to cup her cheeks.

"You shouldn't have had to lose it at all, Lily. This isn't you." James held back his other thoughts, knowing now was not the time. This disheartened, dirty young woman was not Lily. Not his Lily. She wasn't wild and passionate, a mass of barely contained fury and determination. If people had always likened Lily to fire – warm yet dangerous – she was now running out of fuel. Her eyes hadn't left his, he wondered if she could read his thoughts there.

After a moment, Lily shook her head a little and dropped her eyes, breaking away from his hands. "You and Sirius can go back to the wizarding world. They'll take you back, Peter could get you in maybe." The whole group winced at the mention of Peter. "But I can't go back and I don't want to go back to magic if it's going to be this constant battle to be accepted."

James frowned, his fingers going under Lily's chin and tilting it up to look at him. Words weren't going to bring his Lily back. So he leaned down and kissed her lips, hard.

Lily took a moment to register the action, before she jolted back from James. Her face flushed, her eyes bright, she only paused for a moment before slipping her arm up around James' neck and pulling him down to her, kissing him this time.

Mary and Marlene rolled their eyes. Sirius threw his hands up in the air with an exclamation of "Finally!" while Remus simply smiled.

"If we can get Lily to fight back, I'm pretty certain we can convince anyone." Mary said, her smile returning.

"I don't think James is going to snog everyone." Remus pointed out.

"Yeah, but that's why we've got Sirius."

For the first time in a long time, they all laughed.


End file.
